How do kids learn to read body language?

Can you tell what someone is thinking even when they don’t say anything? We want to know if you’re a good “face detective” who can read people’s body language to figure out what they might be thinking and feeling.

In our experiment, we show children videos of other children playing with some LEGOs at the Museum of Science. Sometimes the children were playing all by themselves and sometimes they were playing with somebody else, but all of our videos show only one child playing and not what is going on nearby. In our study, we ask people, can you tell whether the child is playing with someone or playing alone? If someone else is there, is it someone the child knows, like their mother or father, or is it someone they don’t know very well?

These games are designed to tell us how kids use face and body movement to understand social interactions. Can kids “decode” social behavior? How quickly can they tell what’s going on in a social setting? How do children of all ages read other people’s facial expressions and gestures in order to figure out what’s going on around them?

By playing these games with kids, we can figure out how children are able to understand social situations in everyday life. By studying what kind of judgments typically developing children are able to make (and how quickly they are able to make them), we can also learn how to help children who have problems understanding social behavior.

Learn about other research related to Reasoning about Social Situations.

This research is conducted by the Kanwisher Lab at MIT